Classpass Founder: Quitting My 9-5 Led To A $1 Billion Business: Payal Kadakia | E141

Kadakia’s ‘light’ was the feeling she got from dance—making others feel something and being her most authentic self. That clarity let her recognize that excelling in consulting without passion was a hollow victory. She argues that following societal checklists (job, marriage, house) without interrogating your own expectations leads to emptiness and, eventually, hopelessness. Action: audit your life against what genuinely lights you up rather than what earns approval.

She ‘earned her stripes’—elite education, Bain, Warner—meeting her parents’ and society’s expectations while quietly building savings, skills, and credibility. Only after checking those boxes did she rebel in a directed way, toward her purpose. Action: stop seeing rebellion as random; decide what expectations are useful (skills, network, safety net) and where you must diverge to feel alive.

Her first product burned through roughly $500,000 and a year of work, garnered press and followers, but almost no bookings—“false signals of success.” The turning point was detaching from the original OpenTable-style idea and re-attaching to the mission: get people to class. That mindset allowed her to kill names, products, and pricing repeatedly until the ClassPass subscription emerged. Action: define your mission in one sentence and make every product and metric subordinate to that.

Early on, Kadakia’s team hid behind screens in an incubator instead of being in studios. Once they started interviewing studio owners and users, they discovered studios were happy to offer free trials and customers loved variety. When users tried to rebuy a one-time ‘Passport’ over and over, that behavior revealed the demand for an ongoing multi-studio subscription. Action: schedule regular field time with users and partners; treat unexpected behaviors as clues, not anomalies.

Knowing money is the main excuse people give for not pursuing purpose, she lived lean, skipped travel and shopping, and built a savings buffer. Before quitting, she and her father calculated she had three years of runway to try entrepreneurship without panicking over bills. That safety let her focus on solving the right problem rather than on survival. Action: decide explicitly what you’ll sacrifice to build a runway (time, lifestyle, geography) and for how long.